Slashdot Mirror
Vista Security Discussions Get a Rocky Start
narramissic writes "A technical glitch Thursday morning prevented many security vendors from participating in the first online discussion regarding Microsoft's plans for opening up the Vista kernel, ITworld reports. In a blog posting on the subject, Microsoft Senior Product Manager Stephen Toulouse wrote, 'We had a glitch where we sent out a messed up link. ... We're very sorry about that, it certainly was not intentional and we definitely see that was not a good thing for people to experience on such an important topic.'"
Microsoft employee sends an email with an incorrect URL in it! Collapse of Micrsoft predicted! End of the world is nigh! Extra, Extra, read all about it!
Slashdot has just sunk to a new low of pointlessness in their "articles". Urgh.
While it seems more a move to placate a rabid EU, this move is actually pretty good for all users.
First, not all users will get the APIs. In fact, only a tiny fraction of users, all of whom work at security and anti-virus companies, will get to see these opened APIs. Why then is it good news?
It's good because it brings into the fold those most able to spot security issues. Despite Microsoft's money and the experience of their top engineers, they all have tunnel-vision when it comes to Windows. And it's not hard to see why, after all, it's their baby. So even though they've got top security people working for them looking deeply into these issues, the very nature of those engineers' employment makes it difficult to see some of the problems that an outside observer would be able to spot easily.
By turning the baby over to the wolves, so to speak, Microsoft is getting Vista tested by the best testing teams around. The OSS motto is "more eyes makes all bugs shallow", I look forward to that same principle working well here.
To err is human.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Like it never happened to anybody!
This is beyond bashing, this is being anal.
What's your point? That's the nature of the "work around defects in the operating system" market. Eventually, even Microsoft fixes them, and you don't have a market anymore. I hate Microsoft, and I still can't blame them for this. It's not like they're the first vendor to include, say, a filesystem that doesn't require constant defragmentation, or a stateful firewall.
I certainly don't think this is a case of "accidentally-on-purpose." But I do think it is a symptom of a endemic problem in the PC industry, which is lack of attention to usability because computer people are intolerant of human fallibility. Even though they exhibit just as much human fallibility as anyone else, when they encounter a technical glitch they are reluctant to blame the design of the system.
Sure, "everyone has glitches from time to time," but when people at Microsoft can't get an important web meeting to work it suggests that there's something flawed about this "all-net-all-the-time" vision they've been touting for more than five years.
Computer technology reached a peak of usability in the early 1990s, when PC vendors still felt that they had to make things easy to use (and supply real support) in order to secure adoption. Once everyone was locked in--not so much to Microsoft, but to PC technology in general--usability was allowed to deteriorate.
The pretense that unreliable, hard-to-use unfinished technology is ready for release is so imbued into Microsoft's culture that Microsoft managers are evidently willing to use unreliable, hard-to-use, unfinished technology to conduct important Microsoft public business.
Stepto should _not_ blame "us" for the "glitch" and apologize. Instead, they should take a long hard look at what it was about the technology they were using that made it easy to "send out a messed-up link."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Oh please, get over yourself. Someone made a typo on a firewall rule or an e-mail and you go on some huge rant about how MS sucks and consumers everywhere should stop buying their products. It's not a religion, it's a tool. MS has some of the best tools available on the market for some tasks. Other companies like Apple, IBM, Sun, etc. have better tools for some tasks. When you try to convince people to alter the MS intertia by ranting over this insignificant thing then you give the 'other' camp a bad name. And it doesn't matter whether you're an Apple fanboy, linux fanboy, or just anti-MS. There's two main categories in most of the business world: MS and other. You give other a bad name.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
News headline: God has changed the human being structure to not be susceptible to disease anymore. Antibiotic firms complain, consider it unfair competition.
(the point: if you're a parasite company that's living off anothers companies flaws, bugs and holes, don't complain about the cure)
It was a false flag operation. It was reported that the only reason it wasn't carried out was that Kennedy rejected the plan. I'm not saying 9/11 was a false flag operation, but you have to be wearing blinders not to see the similarities between this actual, documented, nearly implemented plan and what the conspiracy theorists allege about 9/11. If the US government nearly did it once, isn't it possible that, under a more hawkish president, we might actually have done what the conspiracies allege?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You're taking me a bit literally and out of context, let me clarify. A world without the 'reporters' that I'm talking about would be good. We definitely need journalists, or people who legitimately report on world affairs in an unbiased neutral "here's what happened" form. We don't need tabloid media. Reading CNN's RSS vs CBC's is incredible (and the CBC is not the least biased medium out there either).
As for the congressman and pages, that thread follows my argument completely: A lot of the 'reports' you see about it are nothing but hearsay and spin (just what I expect from Fox News and / or CNN). A 'report' would be that the congressman in fact did this, the page is safe and sound, and that the republican party disapproves and are investigating while suspending the congressman's membership (hypothetical example). A 'report' is not speculation on what this will do to the Republican party's chances in terms of votes or what Dohickey McGregor thinks about the mother of the page putting him in harm's way or whatever other useless experts and theorists they dig up. That is a spin on the real story. Jon Stewart provides better impartial views and more honest analysis than the spinners do, and he is a self-professed gag-media outlet. "fake news."
The Iraq war falls into the same category: the media has us so confused with a constant barrage of "here's the real story," that nobody knows what to think. I don't even know if they know what they're saying in the first place! It's pretty much "if we say Bush is under fire and Iraq is difficult, we'll sell more ads."
This MS thing was not even news, that is my point about reporters and PR.